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Aug 11

News Designed for Information Overload

Paul Scrivens:

“The design dilemma these sites are facing is that their is simply too much content. Instead of trying to narrow down what content needs to be shown on the homepage, they try to find ways to ensure that all content is shown on the homepage. [...] The only reason I scan a news page is because I have a hard time keeping my eyes focused on one spot. [...] The trick is to not allow your readers to scan the page, but to force their eyes to go into a state of perpetual motion until their finger saves them and clicks on a link. Brilliant.”

 

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31
Jul 11

The Knowing Doing Gap

I recently started reading the book, The Knowing Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford) and Robert Sutton (Professor of Management science, Stanford).

I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

  1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
  2. Abandon that path quickly.
  3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
  4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
  5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
  6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

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9
Jun 11

iCloud Single Sign-On

Apple announced iCloud earlier this week, and this has been a long time coming. Not in that the feature itself is something that everyone has been asking for, but it solves a problem many applications have: maintaining state between hardware devices.

Google’s answer to this problem is that the device doesn’t matter. Its all about the browser. Apples answer is iCloud — it’s all about apps.

[A short recap for those just joining the conversation, iCloud is a thing that enables sharing of data between your devices. You take a picture on your iPhone, and moments later that photo is on your iPad, in iPhoto on your Mac, and even the photos folder on your PC. Apple is initially building this into many apps: iTunes, Photos, App Store, iBooks, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Backup, Contacts, Calendar, and Mail]

Why is this important?
Today maintaining state between computers, smartphones and tablets relies on a hodge-podge of technologies:

  • Mail is kept in sync using special imap server settings on each device.
  • Music is sync’d only with a cable connected to iTunes running on just one computer. Same for bookmarks, photos, iBooks.
  • Kindle books, probable the closest in style to iCloud, syncs through my Anazon login. Yet that one login on each device gets me precious little beyond the books.
  • Calendars use a mashup of CalDAV, Googles services, and Microsoft Exchange. My address book is in a similar situation.
  • OmniFocus todo’s are sync’d through a custom WebDAV folder on my edstrom.net server.
  • Dropbox, one of my favorite utilities, also comes close. Their big claim to fame is their open API which many applications have adopted instead of building their own sync layer. And there is certainly demand for it: take a look at all the Dropbox apps.
  • Games may or may not save state…

In a lot of ways, I think iCloud is the answer to the old buzz catch-phrase: Single Sign-On. Now I can sign into any device -once- and all my apps, my photos, my documents, my music … will all be there. Outside of the browser window.

 

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30
Mar 11

Path Dependence

David Brooks, Tools for Thinking on the concept of path dependence:

This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”

For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.

When I suggest changing a technology that has been around for a while, I always argue that “it was the right decision at the time” but also that “it may no longer be the right decision”. I find this acknowledges the good work that had been done, while also giving those same people space to consider new approaches without being blamed for the old.

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24
Mar 11

Quote of the Day

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

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